'Drawings That Exceed the Walls' Exhibition by 20 Imprisoned Cartoonists to Open in İzmir

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The Görülmüştür Team will open an exhibition that consists of the works by 20 imprisoned cartoonists in the province of İzmir between April 13 and 16.

The exhibition, named "Drawings that exceed the walls," will be at the İzmir Kültür Park Pakistan Pavyonu in İzmir.

The Görülmüştür Team has been working for eight years to draw attention to the rights violations in prisons and raise the voice of the isolated inmates and opening exhibitions in Turkey and Europe with this theme.

HOMUR Cartoon and Humor Group also supports the exhibition.

"It is hard to reach prisoners under the state of emergency"

The Görülmüştür team made the following statement on the exhibition:

"As "Görülmüştür Team", we have decided to prepare a joint project with the artists who are still imprisoned or convicted. We entered 30 different prisons with difficulty and tried to reach nearly 50 artists and cartoonists.

"We asked them to participate in the project, which we call "Drawings that exceed the walls" and to draw cartoons with "Freedom" theme. Due to the acceleration of exiles and dispatches after OHAL (State of Emergency), we had a hard time to reach out to many prisoners.

"After a long struggle, 15 prisoners, three of whom were women, contributed to our project. They showed that it could be produced by working with insufficient material in the cells they were kept."

How did they draw in prisons?

"For example, we learned that journalist and painter Zehra Doğan, who participated in our project, painted using tincture of iodine and vegetable residues in Tarsus Women's Prison, where materials such as painted pencils, brushes and canvas were prohibited. As a result, the prisoner cartoonists we contacted sent us their original cartoons in spite of unimaginable prohibitions in isolation.

"Of course in this process, which we briefly summarized, the result was not easy to achieve. As a first step to exhibit the cartoons sent by prisoner cartoonists, we benefited from the experiences of Homur magazine cartoonists Aşkın Ayrancıoğlu, Atilla Atala, Canol Kocağöz and Hüseyin Aslan, who have national and international awards and are sensitive to social issues.

"Adil Okay, who was the pioneer of that project, corresponded with painters and cartoonists in prisons and also assumed editor role in exhibition book."

The aim of the project

The Görülmüştür Team states the aim of the project as follows: 

• As of 2019, to remind the increasing presence of 260.000 inmates and convicts in prisons to the people outside.
• To announce the inner voice to the people outside and show them that they are not just a number or statistics.
• To contribute to the spiritual well-being of imprisoned artists, who have been isolated by unbelievable disciplinary punishments instead of "rehabilitation".
• To encourage prisoners interested in plastic arts in prisons. To provide them the opportunity to express themselves.
• To draw attention to the prohibitions of painting materials which are put in arbitrary terms in some prisons by ignoring the prison regulations. To ensure the observance of the Prison Rules of European Convention on Human Rights which Turkey has already signed (2006). To create a public opinion in order to increase the number of "Art Workshops", which have limited numbers in 400 prisons in Turkey, and make them functional.

(HK/VK)